WITH a robust attendance and
informative, stimulating addresses,
David Irving's third annual "Real
History" conference
was a roaring success. About 150 persons,
most of them from the eastern and central
United States, and a few from as far away
as Australia, met over Labor Day weekend
-- Friday, August 31, through Monday,
September 3 -- at a large, first-class
Marriott hotel in Cincinnati.

Irving, the conference organizer and
host, was the central figure of the
four-day event. The well-known British
historian also delivered several talks
himself and introduced and commented on
the presentations of the other
speakers.

In his opening night talk, "The Modern
Plague: Historical Conformism," Irving
expressed the hope that in coming years
the term "conformist historian" will
become a widely used epithet. On Sunday
Irving spoke about Winston
Churchill's secret wartime
communications with President
Roosevelt, exchanges that are dealt
with in some detail in his Churchill's
War trilogy.

In a Saturday lecture, "Hitler and the
Final Solution: Are We Any Nearer to the
Truth?," Irving cited copies of little
known World War II documents that were
also distributed to the attendees.
Particularly noteworthy was a Dec. 1,
1941, order
by Heinrich Himmler that, Irving
said, apparently was issued following a
stern rebuke by Hitler because of an
unauthorized mass shooting of Jews the day
before near Riga, Latvia, including
several hundred Jews who had just arrived
by train from Germany.

Writing to SS General Jeckeln,
the SS and Police Leader for the large
Ostland region that encompassed the Baltic
lands and Belarus, Himmler ordered:

"The Jews resettled in the
Ostland region are to be treated only
in accord with the guidelines laid down
by me or by the Reich Security Main
Office. I will punish those who act on
their own authority or in contravention
[of the guidelines]."

Irving reported on his legal and
financial struggles in an off-camera talk
given on Monday. Even when speaking about
the courtroom defeats in his
well-publicized libel lawsuit
against Deborah Lipstadt and her
British publisher, the historian struck a
confident and upbeat tone. He also spoke
eagerly about his forthcoming legal
battle against Gitta Sereny,
whom he is suing for libel.

As
if to prove his vitality and endurance in
spite of legal setbacks, freshly-printed
copies of the long-awaited second volume
of Irving's Churchill's War trilogy
were available for sale.

Mark
Weber's Address

The first guest speaker to address the
conference was IHR director Mark
Weber. In his Friday evening lecture,
he expressed particular appreciation for
the opportunity to address, for the first
time, a meeting hosted by Irving,
especially given that he has had the honor
of introducing Irving at a number of IHR
meetings over the years. He also recalled
his first meeting with Irving twenty-two
years ago at the National Archives in
Washington, DC.

Taking aim at the oft repeated Six
Million figure of alleged wartime Jewish
"Holocaust" victims, Weber pointed out
that even before the end of the war, this
figure was already a feature of Allied war
propaganda. At the Nuremberg
"International Military Tribunal" of
1945-46, Weber noted, the only basis for
the familiar Six Million figure was the
dubious November 1945 affidavit of
Wilhelm
Höttl, a one-time SS
intelligence officer.

Weber went on to examine, and
discredit, the flawed methodology and
deficient "evidence" presented by
Holocaust historians to support the Six
Million figure, and he cited evidence to
support reasonable estimates of between
one and two million Jewish wartime deaths.
[The full text of Weber's presentation
appears in the Sept.-Dec. 2001 issue of
the IHR's Journal of Historical
Review.]

Other conference speakers included:

Tony
Martin, professor of
African-American studies at Wellesley
College in Massachusetts
(left, with
Douglas Christie), who spoke
about the Jewish role in the
trans-Atlantic slave trade. He related
how he came under tremendous fire for
dealing with this emotion-laden subject
in his classroom courses. It was the
Jewish Talmud, Martin noted, that first
provided supposedly a divinely inspired
foundation for the contention that the
slave status of Blacks was ordained by
God.

Phillip Supina, professor of
history at Shippensburg University of
Pennsylvania, who reviewed Third Reich
Germany's progressive policies in the
fields of environmental protection,
forestry management, humane treatment
of animals, and public health. These
measures, he related, were the most
comprehensive and advanced in the world
at the time.

Joseph Sobran, well-known
conservative columnist and author, who
spoke on "Lincoln, the Democrat
Monarch." His after-dinner talk,
sparkling with insights and
observations collected in researching a
forthcoming book, was delivered during
a river boat cruise.

Michael A. Hoffman,
independent revisionist writer, who
showed an impressive knowledge of
Jewish religious doctrine and history
in his address, in which he detailed
the hatred by Deborah Lipstadt and
others like her for those whom they
regard as enemies of the Jewish
people. Lipstadt and other
Jewish activists, he noted, have
repeatedly compared Irving and other
non-conformist historians to "Amalek,"
the ancient symbolic personification of
the eternal enemy of the Jews.
(Hoffman's own report on the Irving
conference is posted on his web site:
www.hoffman-nfo.com)

Douglas Christie, Canadian
attorney and prominent civil liberties
activist, who gave a passionate address
in defense of freedom of speech. In his
after-dinner address, he reviewed a
number of important free speech battles
in which he had been involved,
including the headline-making cases of
Doug Collins and Ernst Zundel.
Following Christie's talk, attendees
were treated to a spectacular riverside
Labor Day fireworks display.

Peter Kirstein, professor of
history at St. Xavier University
(Chicago), who provided an informative
and eloquently delivered talk on the
background and meaning of the August
1945 US atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.

"Triumph of the Will," the well-known
film documentary of the 1934 National
Socialist party congress in Nuremberg, was
shown on Saturday afternoon. This
path-breaking film work was made by the
legendary Leni Riefenstahl, whose
99th birthday was celebrated on August
22.

Provan-Renk
Debate

Two independent researchers, Charles
Provan of Pennsylvania and Brian
Renk of British Columbia
(below far right,
with Mr Irving), squared off on
Sunday for a lively debate about wartime
mass killings in gas chambers in the
Auschwitz-Birkenau
camp.

Much
of the debate focused on some apparent
"holes"
in the ruins of the collapsed roof of
morgue cellar (Leichenkeller) I at
Birkenau crematorium (Krema) II. Both
Provan and Renk presented enlarged
transparency photos of these crude
"holes," with steel reinforcement bars
sticking out. Provan argued that these
holes are the remains of carefully and
deliberately made openings for pouring in
Zyklon B to kill trapped Jews inside,
while Renk expressed the view that these
are merely coincidental "holes" that
resulted from the explosive blowing-up of
the structure in 1945.

To most attendees these jagged openings
did not appear to have been carefully or
conscientiously constructed. For example,
none of the holes seemed to have a
straight edge or smooth finish, which one
would expect if they had been designed and
built as an openings for pouring in
Zyklon.

Provan readily acknowledged that many
claims about Auschwitz are empty
propaganda. He even expressed the view
that the "holes" shown on enlargements of
1944 Allied aerial reconnaissance
photographs of morgue cellar (LK) I at
Krema II were drawn in, which suggests
deceitful tampering with photographic
evidence.

Provan and Renk also discussed the
wartime investigations, and the postwar
testimonies, of Konrad
Morgen, an SS investigator whose
bureau carried out hundreds of judicial
inquiries into murder and other abuses in
the wartime camps. Morgen and his SS
colleagues brought some 400 fellow
officers to trial [during World War
II], of whom 200 were punished. Five
SS camp commandants were arrested, and two
were put to death for their crimes.

WITH Irving's permission, Weber briefly
contributed to the debate. He noted that,
as even anti-revisionist researcher
Jean-Claude Pressac has acknowledged, the
Birkenau crematory structures were
woefully, even laughably, unsuitable and
inappropriate as facilities for mass
killings. Kremas II and III, Weber
continued, were constructed in late 1942
and early 1943, and completed between
March and late June 1943 -- that is,
months after a decision had supposedly
been made to kill hundreds of thousands of
Jews in these facilities.

The official story these days, he went
on, is that these Kremas were built as
ordinary crematory facilities with
morgues, but were later modified or
adapted to serve as mass killing
facilities. As Pressac has further
acknowledged, not only Kremas II and III,
but also Kremas IV and V, which were built
even later, were not designed or built as
mass killing facilities, and were at best
only very awkwardly suited for this
purpose.

Weber also spoke about Konrad
Morgen,
[the SS
judge] about whom he had
testified at some length in the second,
1988 Zündel trial in Toronto. Weber
related his feeling of awe upon reading
for the first time, at the National
Archives in Washington, the original
indictment brief drawn up by Morgen
against Buchenwald
commandant Karl Koch, who was
executed by the SS
for murder and corruption. Weber
stressed that Himmler sanctioned Morgen's
investigation and prosecution of camp
commandants, even for murder of inmates.
This included Morgen's investigation of
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf
Hoess. Weber stressed the
difficulty of reconciling Morgen's work
with [the existence of] a German
extermination program.